Thursday, December 3, 2009

DIGITIZE
-- Want Results? Access Capture is the Way to Go...FAST
-- Museum Community Adopts Access Capture Delivery

DELIVER
-- LUNA: Development Milestones for Personalization and eCommerce
-- Featured LUNA Collections Portal
-- Upcoming Conference Opportunities
-- Let’s Talk: Hosting

Want Results? Access Capture is the Way to Go...FAST

Successful institutions are taking control of their own digital destiny. With some of their most fascinating collections unnoticed in small repositories, forward thinking institutions are targeting these collections for digitization — aiming to deliver content to wider audiences, raise awareness, and ensure long term viability.

Luna Imaging has partnered with several institutions over the past year to support these initiatives. With our Access Capture and related conversion services we can deliver complete projects rapidly and inexpensively.

Rapid capture techniques that were originally developed to capture books can be adapted for large photo collections as well. Luna’s collaboration with the California State University Dominguez Hills (CSUDH) Department of Archives and Special Collections to digitize the photograph collection of the Long Beach Firefighter’s Museum is representative of these projects. Herb Bramley, the Museum’s founder and curator says his goals for usage of the images go way beyond public accessibility. “The digital images will inform our equipment restoration efforts, teach our new firefighters about their professional heritage, and provide a resource for relatives of firefighters to learn more about their family members who served in the department. Without Luna’s help in digitizing the materials, none of this would be possible.” Funded by a grant, the project includes 6000 large format B&W negatives and over 700 B&W prints which were sent to Luna for digitization using area array capture. Our expert digital imaging technicians are able to cost-effectively produce consistently high quality images despite the inconsistencies inherent in a collection of photographs that have been shot over several decades by various photographers using multiple film stocks.

Upon completion of digitization, the materials will be returned to CSUDH, where Greg Williams, Director of Archives and Special Collections, says he is “thrilled to be able to store the Firefighter’s Museum Collection and very happy to have been chosen to help preserve this important archive.”

Museum Community Adopts Access Capture Delivery

Luna Imaging joined the museum community in Portland for the Museum Computer Network conference in November where experts from leading museums discussed how and why they, too, have recently adopted Access Capture as a solution for digitizing their image collections. The speed of area-array capture enables museums to quickly digitize collections and satisfy audience demand for access. Because it is faster and much less expensive, area array capture often removes project barriers such as a time consuming selection process (digitize everything!) or whether to go with grayscale or RGB (the capture cost is the same).

Even before this relatively recent adoption of Access Capture, we worked hard to perfect this process and are happy to have predicted correctly that this would become the standard for cultural heritage institutions. So if you need to digitize your collection quickly and affordably, we're ready.

LUNA: Development Milestones for Personalization and eCommerce

The Insight + LUNA v6.0 release revolutionized digital collections with the introduction of the new LUNA browser and in subsequent releases we have continued to add features and functionality in LUNA. The 6.2.1 release in September included My Uploads and Annotations, features that allow audiences to use and personalize collections in ways never before possible.

Our 6.2.2 release, scheduled for this month, includes new features our clients have requested. Institutions interested in monetizing their collections can now opt to include a “Buy” button in the Detail View to effortlessly link each item in the collection to eCommerce sites such as Pictopia. Institutions can also offer users a selection of file sizes for download (may be permissions based) to facilitate productivity and creativity. Learn more about recent releases.

We encourage you to explore LUNA firsthand at LUNAcommons.org.

Featured LUNA Collection: Cornell University's LUNA Collections Portal Illustrates the Potential

Collections in Insight can be built for public, private, or shared access. Insight collections published to LUNA are fully optimized for web search engines and distribution-ready for the new LUNA Commons, thereby providing access to thousand of end users who may not otherwise know about your collections. Collections available through the LUNA Commons can also be available through your institutional license. This way, all of your LUNA collections can be centrally managed for your user community.

We are pleased to highlight how Cornell University represents both Cornell collections as well as LUNA Commons collections in one location — allowing users to quickly search and discover resources without having to jump from site to site. Visit the Cornell University LUNA Collections Portal.

Visit Luna at Upcoming Conferences

Our 2009 conference season just concluded with Educause in Denver and MCN in Portland. The 2010 season begins with the Mid-Winter ALA meeting scheduled for January 15-18 at the Boston Convention and Exhibition Center. Please visit us in Booth 2047.

Let's Talk Hosting

Most institutions are changing the way they think about server architecture and how they provide their IT infrastructure. Virtualized environments, SaaS (Software as a Service), and cloud computing are all being embraced as reliable, cost-effective alternatives to the traditional model. If you’re ready to stop spending your time on complex software installations, upgrades and backups, it’s time to give us a call. You could be focusing on building your collections!

If you're interested in SaaS (Software as a Service) or in our web-scale hosting of your Insight + LUNA collections please contact sales@lunaimaging.com or call 1.800.452.LUNA (5862).